More about website development

Dave Hrynkiw
October 15, 2019

A decent website is a core of a web-centric store like ours. Back in the early days, I hand-coded HTML (yeah, go back to waybackmachine to admire that work), and what you got is what you got. Since then, we rebuilt Solarbotics.com through 3 more iterations of totally refactored hand-coded platforms, and then 2 aborted attempts as re-releases on Magento and then WordPress/Woocommerce. Those last two attempts cost us the ball-park of a really really nice Tesla with nothing much to show for it, with a devastating website hack in-between to kick us in the nether-regions. Many expensive and painful lessons were learned in this process.

Since then, we've released unsatisfactory consultants, brought the development management in-house, and piece-mealed specific development aspects to consultants with MUCH better results. It's come at the cost of letting our internal R&D coast for the better part of a year while we focus our top-talent on getting the website reworked, but its something that needed to be done.

We are about to re-release Solarbotics.com on a WordPress/Woocommerce platform, with some new features added, and some others removed. We'll be staging out further enhancements as we get comfortable with the platform, and hope you'll continue being good customers of Solarbotics.com.

MORE POSTS

May 17, 2001
Review of the Scoutwalker II

Nuts and Volts author Robert Nansel has reviewed our SW2 kit and has written up an excellent review. You can get a sample magazine from the Nuts and Volts website or search their distributers page for where you can get the magazine. Check out the add on page 53 for our add, as well as […]

April 5, 2007
Closin' for Easter

It's Easter Break, and we at Solarbotics are shuttin' down for the weekend as of Thursday. See you Monday Morning!

September 24, 2002
Tilden Lecture in Pasadena

A quick message from Mark W. Tilden...: Just a heads up that following a lecture by yours truly ("World Domination through Robot Toy Marketing"), 200 BIObugs will be released for mass behavioral experiments on Sunday, October 13 at the Ritz-Carlton in Pasadena, CA. Could be a record for the largest array of cooperating autonomous robots […]

March 19, 2001
Los Alamos BEAM Workshop

We're happy to announce that the 2001 Los Alamos BEAM Robotics Workshop is going ahead this May 3 to 6th! After much delay and threats of budget-cuts, funding has finally been secured. Thanks to Joe Vigal and Paul Argo of the Los Alamos National Laboratories for keeping this great event alive for this final year! […]

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